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USAR Captain (Ret.) Yancy Caruthers and I have
been best friends for more than 30 years, and in that time, he has given me
more good advice and encouragement than probably any human being has a right. I am proud to say he has agreed to guest blog for
you and I today at Scene Clearly
about his techniques and success in writing flash fiction.Look for his stories in such online
pubications as Ascent Aspirations
coming in 2013.

* * *

Flash fiction, or
short-shorts, have nothing to do with Daisy Duke (Catherine Bach, not Jessica
Simpson), although they certainly could. They are defined as stories with
less than 1,000 words, and are increasingly popular with online venues.
Some forums ask for even less. Like Daisy's shorts, shorter is better.

As our collective attention
span wanes, (Oh look…a squirrel!)

What was I saying?

Get to the point, blogger.

That’s it, thanks for reminding me.
Back in the days of high-school research papers, a required length was
the enemy – it need only be exceeded, and all was well. It was easier to
write a three-page paper than a six-pager. The use of maximum verbosity
and superfluous words was encouraged by the format, so the idea was to cram in
as much unnecessary crap as possible. Never use a big word when a
diminutive one will suffice.

Writing flash fiction has the same
enemy, except the author is on the other side of it.

To make my point, there are 150
words preceding this paragraph. If the venue has a maximum of 500 words,
then the show is 30% done, and I have barely defined my topic!

For this reason, short-shorts are
usually limited to a single scene. There might be two characters, but
certainly no more than three, and the reader can’t know them. As a writer
of short-shorts, you have a choice between setting the scene and rounding out
the character. Do too much of either, and you are toast.

Oh wait, a plot. Excessive
exposition is strictly off-limits, and more than a few lines of dialogue is
also a no-go, so better start with action on the part of the characters.
You don’t have time to build fear, the reader has to start out
afraid. In the first line of the story, the psychopath is RIGHT BEHIND
YOU. The intruder has to already BE in the house. The smoke is
ALREADY coming under the door.

Consider this opening line:

Steve jerked his hand from the
doorknob as it burned his hand.

What
does the reader know? Well, I'm pleased to meet you, Steve, but we don't
have time for introductions, nor do I really care what you ate for breakfast or
that you just broke up with your girlfriend last week. Your building is
on fire, and leaving by the front door is not going to work. You better
do something fast or it's goodbye, Steve.

He pulled the last of his towels
from the arm of his wheelchair and began rolling it.

The reader isn't stupid, we know
what Steve will do with the rolled-up towel, so there is no need to say it.
We've also got a good idea that our hero won't be taking the
stairs. In two short sentences, we know a lot about Steve and his
current situation, and man, is he screwed, or what?

Of course what follows will be what
Steve does, and how his fear builds.

Three quarters to your word limit,
and you should go back and eliminate the unnecessary, to make room for the
ending. Here’s an example:

Todd wasn’t sure if Karen was awake
or not, but surely she was. He made a soft “shhh” and slowly pulled back
the covers. The scratching sound they made when he did so was deafening,
in spite of his efforts.

It makes the point. But
consider this:

Todd wondered if Karen slept.
"Shh," he whispered just in case and eased back the covers that
despite his effort scratched loudly, like sandpaper.

Both paragraphs say the same thing.
The first in 40 words, the second in 24.

So what would possess an author to
write flash fiction?

That’s easy, it’s fast. It’s
so fast that you can’t get married to it. Instead of carefully
cultivating that final version, you can easily manage two or
three alternate endings – in fact, with a few changes, that scenario can
result in more than one completed story. If you hate it, write it anyway, and
change it later.

It's so fast, in fact, that one can
scribble a few notes before bedtime, and draft a piece the next morning.
With a few revisions, it can be headed to an editor before the sunset.

In the end, that’s why I write
short-shorts. I wanted to finish something, and the three-page paper was
still more alluring than the six-page one.

Nothing I've ever
written has come within a parsec of making $89 million. This number
incidentally is the (as of this writing) worldwide box office of the 2011 movie
Sucker Punch, of which I am about to
break that rule of "If you can't say something nice . . ."

The point I want to make is that it is easy,
especially for new writers, to mistake special effects for elements that move
the story forward. Generally, they do not advance the plot. They are
attention-grabbers.Shock value.Spice, but not story.I think it was either Wes Craven or John
Carpenter, when comparing the emotional involvement required to create horror
as opposed to simple on-screen scares ("Boo!"), said he could produce
the same effect by showing the audience blank celluloid and somewhere in the
middle have the film pop!The same thing happens in movies or books where
the writer tries to stuff ten pounds of special effects into a one-pound sack.

Films like Friday
the 13th no longer have the ability to scare the average movie goer.Creating an assembly line of "That's
cool!" moments does not work for long if the writer failed to give us
characters and themes to care about. Eventually it pushes us past horror and
disgust to the point that it just becomes funny.Next to indifference, unintentional
laughter is just about the worst response a writer can receive to his or her
story.

Explosions in space, ray guns, car chases,
profanity, sex, etc. are all the same when pasted into the works gratuitously.
The story goes out of its way to give
the reason for the characters to fist-fight, swear, or get nekkid. Pretty flashing lights get boring after a while, and 300 pages is a long while.

To belabor this point, I am going to rehash a
review I wrote a little over a year ago of Sucker
Punch. . . .

***

My wife's and my entertainment
choices rarely agree. For example, she refers to my library as "That
crap you read." It's gotten to the point that I can begin a sentence
with, "I like..." and she instinctively shouts, "Crap!"

"But it's--"

"Crap!"

"No, I'm talking about--"

"Crap!"

"Will you listen to me?"

"Crap, crap, crap. Crap.
Crap-crap-crap-crap!"

"But--"

"Crap!"

"I--"

"Crap!"

"Tonya likes--"

"Good stuff!" Then
she smiles.

Okay. Okay. I admit I
occasionally watch movies that ... um ... Well, if The Shawshank
Redemption is an A movie and Godzilla Versus the Bongo Monster is a
B movie, then these would land somewhere around W.

When I first saw the trailer for Sucker
Punch, I was extremely underwhelmed. I strained at least a dozen
brain cells wondering whether somebody unintentionally made a live-action Powerpuff
Girls movie. A few days before the home video release, I saw new
trailers. In these, this pigtailed blonde in a half ninja, half school
girl outfit was whipping around a Samurai sword, dodging bullets, and jumping
in slow motion. Part of my brain -- the part that later I inevitably
refer to as Temporary Stupidity -- took note of the ka-pows! and shings!
and booms! and made me say, "You know, that kind of looks
cool."

And so while everybody else in the
world was going to opening night of Harry Potter, I rented Sucker
Punch.

The box claimed it was only 110
minutes long. I'm pretty sure this was in dog years, though. The
story proved a little bit hard to follow, assuming you measure your
"little bits" by the metric ton. I will do my best to recap.

It's a dancin' movie, like Footloose.
But nobody really dances and I suspect Kevin Bacon would have filed for a
restraining order if the movie ever wandered within six degrees of separation
from him. Oh sure, every once in a while, Sweet Pea wiggles just a little
bit (remember "little bits" are relative here) but it never actually
reaches the exuberance of, say, sleepwalking. But that doesn't matter, because
as soon as there is even the slightest chance someone might Vogue, we fly into
an extreme close-up of Sweet Pea's eyelashes, which are each just about the
same size as the average feather duster. The angle rotates to an
extreme close-up of her temple, her ear, her blonde pigtail, and the back of
her head, where we stop and experience two magical realizations: we have
traveled Somewhere Else, and we are about to begin a mind-boggingly implausible
fight scene.

Don't get me wrong, I like to watch
an itty bitty Powerpuff Girl slice and dice a 30-feet-tall demon samurai just
as much as the next guy. All the fight scenes are cool. It would
have helped however if they all belonged in the same movie. Because the
next time we get a close-up of her eyelashes we end up on a train shattering
shiny robots or in the air popping WWII Zeppelins.

There's Nazis.

And there's steampunk.

And there's robots.

And there's steampunk robot Nazis.

Then, when it's all over and we zoom
out from her eyelashes, we're back in the theater and everybody is clapping and
telling Sweet Pea what a dancin' prodigy she is.

Oh, and the dancers might be hookers
(well, actually love slaves), or they might be patients in a big ole Dr.
Frankenstein insane asylum. The bad guy might be a sleazy wealthy thug
packing a tommy gun or he might be sleazy nurse with a key around his
neck. And, the songs are really cool, but they may just be part of the
lobotomy.

Either way, my brain hurts.

After the 110 minutes in dog years
was over, I realized that the only reason I began watching Sucker Punch
was because I was younger and more impressionable then. I brought the
movie back into the living room and set it on top of the These Go Back Tomorrow
pile.

"It was crap, wasn't it?"
my wife snickered.

"It was a dancin' movie,"
I said. "Where everybody was kung fu fighting."

***

If you'll remind me, one of these days, I'll
talk about how to use special effects . . . well, effectively.

Related Post:

Somebody
famous said it.I'm sure of it.I think it was a guy, and I'm pretty sure he
was a writer.

He(?)
said, "Don't get an agent until you are making enough to afford a good
one, because 10% of nothing is nothing."

Essentially,
a literary agent's job is to say, "Okay, you write.I'll distract 'em!"Agents act as a buffer between you and those publishers
seemingly compelled to say
"No!" to any question asked them.They sniff out Mr. Grinch clauses from contracts.They are marketing managers. They walk into
your life to handle the business side of writing after you have become so successful
you no longer have time to write and
sell.You need one when the percentage
of his commission from your sales is big enough to snag his attention and when your
schedule demands outweighs the expense.

You
don't need one for short stories.

You
don't need one for a first novel.

You
don't need one to get your book on the Amazon Kindle Store.

Disadvantages

Picking
an agent ranks somewhere around the difficulty level of teaching cats to
whistle.Otherwise reputable resources swell
with the names of No-License-Required professionals promising that with minimal
effort you'll quit your day job and be a millionaire and fart nothing but
rainbows and roses.So, the first
disadvantage is that you can easily get scammed.

Even
if they are legitimate, no agent can guarantee you will get a book deal.Your manuscript being on the right desk at
the right time still dominates all other factors, including your talent.

Will
an agent steal my story?Maybe.Probably not, though, especially since the
income of the average successful writer places him somewhere below the poverty
line.Being a honest agent probably pays
more.

The
good news is that some warning signs exist.Harlan Ellison said, "Money always flows toward the
writer."If they are asking for any
upfront charges, such as a "reading fee" (sometimes polished with the
less threatening epithet of "expenses") they probably will do little
else than relieve you of that pesky disposable income always lying around.The same goes for suggesting an editorial
service.Professional agents have enough
experience to spot the weaknesses in your book.They would simply ask you for a rewrite.

Advantages

You
need an agent.No other choice.* I know, you're probably wondering right now whether
I actually read the first few paragraphs of this post.The truth is most big publishing houses will
not accept unagented material.Editors
don't have time to slog through the stacks of manuscripts written by wide-eyed
gonna-be writers who have not yet figured out that opening with "It was a
dark and stormy night," is not the height of originality.

Of
course, this creates a Catch-22: How do I get published without an agent?You make noise in the publishing world.You get accepted by anthologies and magazines
(the few remaining) frequently enough your name starts getting remembered.You submit quality work to Amazon and learn
as much as you can about marketing so that your ebook sales get noticed.Then, you use these events as collateral to
approach an agent.

Agented
manuscripts skip the slush pile.The
slush pile is the haystack and your manuscript is the needle.It is the bottom level of any publishing
house where sits the vast stacks of unrepresented submissions, most of which
are not yet professional quality.The
slush pile provides the reason most publishers refuse unagented material. For
those rarities who still do (or temporarily open for unsolicited work), a
junior-level editor slips your manuscript from its 4th-class manila envelope
just far enough to read the first paragraph, before immediately tossing it into
the recycle bin. If an SASE happens to fall out, the editor will kindly add a
"Your material does not meet our needs at this time" to your form
letter collection.

When
an agent is involved, you benefit from the fact that your representative might
be on a first-name basis with the person directly responsible for getting your
material onto store shelves. It is human nature to be more likely to buy from
someone we know and trust.At very
least, the editor looks at the contact information and thinks, "Hm, this
is one of Shirley's clients. She's a sharpshooter for hitting Amazon sales.
Let's see if her newest keeps me turning pages after the first chapter."If the editor accepts the submission, the
agent then helps leverage the quality of your life for the next year -- namely
money.

Chris
Rock said that the definition of minimum wage is "I would pay you less but
it is against the law." Like any business, publishers exist to make the
highest profit possible, not to pay writers more than the value of their
product. An agent negotiates higher
advances, movie deals, and generally ensures you are not paid less than the value of your product.

But
long before the talks of royalties and foreign rights, agents help mold you
into a better writer.Their income
depends on how good you really are. They have enough experience to know what
sells.They are not your well-meaning
spouse or your mother and less likely to gush platitudes like, "Sweetie,
you're so talented!" and more likely to say things like, "Um, you
know your burly, profanity-spewing homicide detective?Your target audience is not going to accept
him with the name Bubbles."

Finding an Agent

Landing
an agent is a lot like landing a publisher.Most provide submission guidelines, as to whether they wish to see the
entire manuscript or the first three chapters and an outline.They may prefer not to receive electronic
submissions.Research before sending.

Several
publications offer good places to start.Each year Writer's Digest Books publishes the Writer's Market, and
Information Today Inc. prints an equally good counterpart, the Literary
Marketplace.Note, however, the
copyright of the book as these listings can become dated quickly.

On
the Net, AgentQuery.com aims to be (as stated on their website) " the only
one-stop writer’s resource on the web about literary agents and
publishing."They host a database
of 900 agents that can be searched by genre or keyword.Best of all, you do not have to register to
search.

The
quest for a literary agent is an exercise in patience. It is part of the apprenticeship period, providing an
opportunity to learn how publishing works as opposed to the popular romantic
view of being a writer.You'll be
grateful to be armed with this experience when your time comes.

____________________
* UPDATE (12/28/2012): A kind and observant reader reminded me that not all publishing houses refuse un-agented manuscripts. Small publishers in fact are often quite willing to work directly with the author. So, thanks for keeping me on my toes Lissa.

UPDATE(05/21/2014): The advice in this post has become dated.With
the advent of indie publishing, just about everything in the industry is in
flux now.I personally think this is a
good thing.To quote Dean Wesley Smith,
who is a hybrid author with 30 years of experience, “Agents are not writers,
agents can’t help you rewrite, and they only know about six or seven editors
and nothing at all about the new world of indie publishing.”